It is possible for the best aspects of a people/society to atrophy while they simultaneously expand their wealth/technology/etc.
We can make the world an undeniably better place while also loosing vital things. It's not a zero-sum game. Have we been doing this for 2,500 years? Probably.
It feels like a contradiction only if it's zero sum. But we generate more vital things than we lose, so it feels like (is) progress. But that doesn't mean we're not losing vital things.
We see clearly the flaws around us, but it’s non-obvious that {person} 400 years ago was flawed and lazy as well. Or sick with illness for 15 years, and we vaccinate those today.
It's a commonly repeated trope, yet more often than not such concern being voiced was almost immediately followed by a period of severe decline for the commentator's civilization.
Aristotle saw the end of Athenian democracy and the rise of the Alexander the great, and the following Hellenistic period of mediterranean disorder. Horace was hardly the only one to discuss roman decline, look for Suetonius, Juvenal or Petrone for other examples of same era romans lamenting the decline of Rome.
As for Huxley, it is interesting that much of what is pointed out in this short commentary echoes Ortega y Gasset on the "Revolution of the Masses", Oswald Spengler also comes to mind.
Human history is that of the rise and decline of civilisations, we may well have already been on a downward slope for the past 100 years.
That's exactly right, Technology is always a double edged sword in that manner.
Plato in Phaedrus warned about the forgetfulness implicit in the invention of writing as oral traditions would no longer need to be remembered and passed down...
